Robin Beth Schaer an American poet and sailor who served as a deckhand aboard the HMS Bounty has a written, Falling Overboard, a beautifully evocative essay which she describes as “My love letter and my farewell for my ship Bounty and her captain, lost in the storm.” It was published in the Paris Review Daily. The first paragraph:
At first, I couldn’t sleep on the ship. At night, bunked beneath the waterline, I put my hand against the wooden hull and imagined dark water on the other side pressing back. I lay awake holding my breath, picturing the route I would swim through a maze of cabins and hatches if the ship went down. In port, Bounty had looked tremendous: one hundred and eighty feet long, three masts stretching a hundred feet into the sky, and a thousand square yards of canvas sails. But underway, with ocean spreading toward horizon in every direction, she was small, and inside her I was even smaller.
We don’t hear from enough sailors about how the sea makes them feel. Thanks for this.
Very evocative.